domingo, 30 de agosto de 2015

The mansion by the woods

The mansion had been deserted for years. No
one had seen what was inside, not even the children that crossed under the
broken fence and used the front gardens as a place to play the sport of their
preference. They had even broken some of the remaining windows, which were not
many, but never dared to enter the building to grab their belongings. They knew
that the place was haunted or something worse. When they played, they could
sometimes hear someone slamming the windows and punching the walls or something
like that. It was very scary and they always left when that happened. For them,
it meant that the spirits had been having an especially awful day and they
didn’t want to have anything to do with that. They just left and wouldn’t go in
for a few days.

Curious people had also come around but never
past the fence that still went all around the property. Somehow, adults felt
something else than the children or were frightened easier. The thing was that
every adult that came in contact with the fence started screaming and left in a
huff. The truth was they instantly saw the way they would die in the future. No
one knew if it was an accurate prediction but no one really wanted to find out
anything about that. They just felt they had to leave urgently after seeing
that and just did. Even the children saw and heard more. Adults just wanted to
get the hell out before something scarier presented itself or something like
that. With time, no inhabitant of the nearby town would go near the mansion,
only crazies from other towns.

Despite its fame, the mansion was not in such
a horrible state, not as one would imagine. The place was falling apart in some
areas but the rest looked as beautiful as always, with a mixture of different
tones of marble that looked beautiful, especially in the summer. The gardens
were, of course, all dead because no one was taking care of them but one could
see the past beauty just by taking a stroll. Well, if anyone took a stroll
around the place. The place did not looked like the typical dark haunted house.
It was a very beautiful place that had fallen into disgrace and no one really
knew why. Very few people remain that remember what had happened there.

The people of the town had always been very
apprehensive to anyone that wanted to live in the woods or too far from the
main municipality. The mansion was constructed over a hundred years ago and
even then people watched it, from afar, with disdain. They thought that only
crazy people that shouldn’t be trusted would decide to live in such a place.
After all, the mansion was in the margin of the forest. No one lived there and
the people of the town even tried to stop the construction arguing that it was
a national park. But the forest wasn’t so the mansion was built there without
any modifications to its initial design.

Things were strange even from the start. Not
only many workers left the building site because they had claimed they had seen
creatures coming in from the forest, but also the place remained empty for at
least ten years before a family finally came in to live there. People were very
displeased by this and agreed in a town meeting that no one would ever help
those people, not by selling food or supplies or helping them out of the
region. But that meeting proved useless because the people of the mansion would
ever come to them. The only time they would come in contact with those people
would be when their cars crossed the small town to go from or into the mansion.
Everyone fell silent when that happened, as if a hearse had just passed before
them.

The family that lived in the mansion was said
to be one of the richest in the country They owned various oil fields and mines
all over the country. And somehow, they had chosen such a lost region to come
and live. No one knew if that arrangement would be permanent or only through
the summer but asking would mean that they cared for them and that wasn’t what
they had agreed on. The family did not even realize of the antagonist reaction
of the people on town. The truth was that, for them, the mansion was a small
piece of paradise that was only for them. They could have built it anywhere
else in the country but the grandfather of the lady of the house had loved this
region when young so they went for it.

There was a father, a mother, two little girls
and the youngest, which was a strange little boy. Even people in town knew he
was strange because some of the people that worked in the house would often
come into town and as they had never promised to deny them any service, they
would talk to them even if they were there for only a few minutes. The one who
talked the most was the gardener and it was them who had told the people about
the youngest boy who would never leave the house and was always in a room for
only their parents to see him. The girls had a nanny and they would often spend
time with the cook but the boy would never join them. They believed him to be
around five years old.

The family came and went all summers, even
staying a little bit more some years. They would never get any visitors but
would rather stay inside much of the time. The girls would play a lot around
the gardens and where the only members of the family that had an actual
exchange with the rest of the staff. The two girls were eight and twelve years
old and they would always play together. They would hold hands and skip around
the gardens in order to smell the flowers or follow insects or just play
around. They were cheerful children and, according to the people that worked in
the mansion, no one else but them actually smiled. The father was absent and
the mother was always melancholic.

Then, they stopped coming for some years and
returned three years later. It was the last time people saw the girls, who were
already grown up. They were very beautiful ladies and it was said that the
eldest was about to marry to a well renowned banker. It was on their last visit
that they decided to visit the town and greet many of its inhabitants. No one
asked anything, of course, but they were all mesmerized when seeing the two women.
They had nothing uncommon physically or anything but they just felt strange,
like something was off about them but no one really knew what it was. After
that visit, they would never come back to town or to the mansion. Only her
mother would come and her father, but only some times.

It was obvious that the man of the house had
never liked the mansion or whatever it meant for him. Since the beginning, he
would come and go so many times that people ignored his car after a while.
People thought it was because of work but the truth was, according to the
gardener that the man couldn’t stand to be in that mansion or in the presence
of his wife. Somehow, and all staff agreed on this, he hated his wife and
couldn’t even look at her. No one had ever seen them being nice to each other,
not holding hands or sharing a nice moment. No, the woman was always crying or
pacing around the house and the man would just leave and escape everything that
tied him there.

Then, one particularly hot summer, there was
an explosion in the mansion that could be heard for many kilometers. Apparently
it had been originated in the kitchen. The only casualty was the lady of the
house. Every person in the vicinity was shocked to hear this but no one was
able to go to her funeral. She was buried over night behind the house and that
event marked the time when everyone left the mansion and its slow decay began.
Some children now say that the tombstone in honor of the woman can still be
seen but no adult had ever come that close to check by themselves. Everything
had happened so fast that only years later people would start to remember and
question: And the boy?

Where was the little boy that the staff had sworn
had always been kept in his room, only contacted by his parents? When the
family left the mansion, no one ever saw a child with them and the gardener
remembered clearly he only saw the girls and their father leave. So naturally,
many people assumed the kid was still in the mansion. People would come to “rescue”
him but then the visions started and no adult ever returned to the mansion.
Only children that claim that the sounds where sometimes too much to bear. Some
even confessed to have seen a face in the windows. But they didn’t saw a child,
rather something much stranger and scarier. Something like the devil himself, they
said.